Review: Kingston HyperX 10 Year Anniversary Edition RAM

In 2002, Kingston Technology introduced their first HyperX series products. Ten years and many models later, they are still going strong.

Kingston has been in the industry for 25 years, and the HyperX series launched them into the mainstream. Since then, they have been a solid choice for enthusiasts, gamers, and builders alike, and have since expanded their product lines further, to SSD and USB drives. Today, Kingston arguably has the largest flash memory manufacturer presence worldwide.

To celebrate their success, they recently introduced their HyperX 10th Anniversary Special Edition DDR3 kits earlier this year. These RAM kits range in capacities from 4 to 32 GB, with speeds ranging from 1600 MHz to 2400 MHz, and packaged in kits of 2 or 4. They also have a variety of voltage options, from 1.65V down to a 1.35V ?Lo-Vo? model. Combine these specs with an 8-layer PCB and their lifetime warranty, and you?ve got a serious high-performance solution for your system.

Continuing our quest to build a low-footprint media creation rig, the guys at Kingston provided us with a 16 GB (2 x 8 GB), 1600 MHz CL9 kit of 10th Anniversary Edition RAM. While the specs are humble compared to the 2400 MHz models they have, this kit was the perfect balance of performance, capacity, and voltage.

These kits are compatible with the latest Intel and AMD chipsets, and installation is a breeze. With no special heatsink fins or other aesthetics, each module sits roughly 30 mm above the slot, allowing enough space for large CPU air coolers overhead. These simple heatspreaders give plenty of room for airflow, even in 4-module kit setups. Configuring the RAM to run at full clocks was as easy as enabling the XMP profile in the BIOS. No frequency overrides, no timing tweaking, no checking voltages – Done.

Here are some tests we ran on this 16 GB kit. Other than the default Turbo settings on the i7-3770K, this system is meant to run at stock, for the lowest noise and power footprint. In AIDA64?s Cache & Memory Benchmark, it clocked an average of 18.740 GB/s Read, 19.442 GB/s Write, and had a throughput of 20.568 GB/s. SiSoftware?s Sandra Benchmark confirms these speeds, measuring about 20~21 GB/s of memory bandwidth. And this is all while staying at a stable average of 1.51 V, and 30~34 degrees C.

So how does this translate to real-world use? Being able to view a real-time playback in full 1080p on a secondary display is a huge plus in video editing programs, which requires more dedicated graphics and system memory resources. VFX rendering, 5.1 surround sound mixing, even handling 4K RAW footage – no matter what resource-heavy task we threw at it, the HyperX RAM handled it without breaking a sweat, with solid stability and uptime.

Overall, we?re very satisfied with the build quality and stability of these 10th Anniversary kits, which we?ve come to expect from Kingston memory products over the years, and for more to come.